While a movie flop might ensure that there is no a direct sequel, a box office bomb has never stopped producers rebooting a property if they think there is still money to be made. This is the case with this week’s biggest US movie release, The Girl in the Spider’s Web. It’s the second attempt to tap into the huge popularity of the novel series focusing on hacker Lisbeth Salander, following the commercial disappointment of 2011’s The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo. We’ll know soon enough if there if this one gets a sequel or if we’ll be seeing yet another reboot in seven years time.
Fans of dark cinema will also get to check out the latest JJ Abrams produced horror/thriller, Overlord, which pitches US soldiers against scary genetically altered Nazis in World War II. There’s also the animated version of the much-loved Dr Seuss book The Grinch Who Saved Christmas, while UK audiences can check out the acclaimed thriller Widows a week before it arrives in the US.
On the small screen, Netflix continue its run of impressive movies from notable directors. This week it’s the turn of David McKenzie, who previously made the brilliant thriller Hell or High Water, and who reteams with star Chris Pine for the historical epic Outlaw King. So here’s the week’s new releases in the both the US and UK, in both theaters and on streaming…
DC’s streaming service DC Universe launched in September, offering a mix of original programming and classic superhero titles from the Warner Brothers vault. Flagship show Titans premiered last month, and it is set to be joined in 2019 by several other new titles. One of these will be a Swamp Thing series, and the lead actors have now been announced.
As reported by Variety, Swamp Thing will be played by two actors–Andy Bean (Agents of SHIELD, the upcoming It: Chapter 2) and Derek Mears. Bean will take on the role of Dr Alec Holland, the biologist who transforms into the elemental creature after working in the Louisiana swamp. The creature itself will be played by Derek Mears, who is best known for portraying the iconic killer Jason Vorhees in the 2009 reboot of Friday the 13th.
Swamp Thing doesn’t yet have a premiere date, but we can expect it in 2019. In a recent interview, screenwriter Gary Dauberman provided some details about the show and confirmed that it will contain R-rated content. “We always set out to make Swamp Thing as hard R as we could and go graphic with the violence, with the adult themes and make it as scary as possible,” he said. “Because we’re doing it through the DC Universe streaming service, they really pushed us, although they didn’t have to push hard, for us to go as extreme as we could. Fans of [the comic book] series will know it gets pretty weird and extreme and scary. We really wanted to live up to that standard that [Alan] Moore set up back in the ’80s.”
In addition, Dauberman assured fans that this Swamp Thing will be scary, as opposed to the rubbery creature in Wes Craven’s 1981 movie and the previous TV version. “Swamp Thing himself looks incredible, what Justin Raleigh and the guys over at Fractured are doing with the suit,” he said. “So it’s going to look amazing and less of the ‘man in suit’ that you’ve seen in the movie and the other TV show.”
AMC’s hit TV drama Breaking Bad might have ended back in 2013, but the wider universe it was set in continues to thrive. The prequel show Better Call Saul has been renewed for a fifth season, and now it has been reported that series creator Vince Gilligan is about to start shooting a Breaking Bad movie.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, production on the two-hour film will begin this month in New Mexico. Specific details about the project are scarce and it has not been officially confirmed by AMC. However, THR states that the movie has been known by the working (or possibly fake) title Greenbrier within the industry for some time. The New Mexico Film Office has confirmed that a project with that title is due to start shooting in mid-November.
While we don’t know if the movie will be a prequel or sequel, THR states that it will focus on “the escape of a kidnapped man and his quest for freedom.” Gilligan has written the script and might be directing. It is also unknown if either of Breaking Bad’s main stars–Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul–are set to return. Cranston’s character, Walter White, died at the end of that show.
Better Call Saul premiered in 2015. It follows the earlier life of Breaking Bad’s shady lawyer Saul Goodman, with Bob Odenkirk reprising the lead role. The fourth season finished its run last month, and will return for a fifth season next year. Season 4 saw the storyline get much closer to the events of Breaking Bad, with actors Jonathan Banks (as Mike Ehrmantraut), Giancarlo Esposito (Gus Fring), and Mark Margolis (Héctor Salamanca) all reprising their Breaking Bad roles.
In related news, it was reported this week that AMC is planning a trilogy of Walking Dead movies. Star Andrew Lincoln left the show this week, but he will return as Rick Grimes in three standalone films, which will screen on the network. “These are going to be big, epic entertainments,” Walking Dead chief content officer Scott Gimple said. “Each are quality films. That’s what’s been happening in the industry. We’ve seen Netflix make these, basically, studio films for people to watch in their homes, and we’re going to be doing the same sort of thing here.”
Black Friday is just around the corner, and some retailers are getting started a little early with sales kicking off days or even weeks before the big event. Best Buy has released its Black Friday ad detailing its own deals, and started offering some of the discounts already.
The Best Buy site shows off the circular ad and has some items already marked down. The Oculus Rift bundle has been marked down to $350 from $400, and a few Turtle Beach console headsets are half-priced at $30. The deals also include a selection of TVs from Samsung, Toshiba, and Insignia, ranging from a 32″ HD Insignia for $90 to 50″ Samsung 4K display for $330.
Several laptops are also on sale, including touch-screen hybrids from Dell, Lenovo, and HP, along with $150 off several models of Apple MacBook Pros. Similarly, several models of iPad have been marked down at least $100, with the high-end iPad Pro coming down a full $150. The iPhone 6 and various Android models are also marked down.
This is just a sampling of the discounts, though, as the circular ad shows off several more discounts coming on the actual sales day following Thanksgiving. For more on all the deals and to plan your shopping trips, check out our full wrap-up of all the Black Friday happenings.
Fortnite challenges for Week 7 of Season 6 aren’t particularly difficult. For the most part they involve doing damage to enemies, with one challenge specifically requiring headshot damage and the other being anywhere and everywhere. You’ll also have to search ammo boxes, destroy some trees, munch apples, and take out enemies in a specific location. You can see the complete list of Week 7 challenges for more information on those.
However, one challenge we haven’t mentioned above is a little trickier and most time-consuming than the rest. It’s exclusive to the paid Battle Pass tier, so you’ll need to have that to do it, and involves skydiving through 20 floating rings. That sounds pretty easy, but you’re probably going to have to settle in for a bit of trial and error. What makes this tricky is that, generally, you’ll only be able to do around four rings at a time, so you’ll need to spread it out over multiple matches.
As you float above the island in the bus, you’ll see the rings are immediately visible below. They’re nice and bright, giving you the perfect targets to aim for. You’ll also notice that they cascade downwards in a way that will require some good air control. To actually make it count, you’ll need to be skydiving as you pass through them, but to move from one ring to another while maintaining height and momentum, we recommend switching to the glider. Once you’re close enough, hit the skydive button to go through, and then switch back to the glider to make your way to the next one.
As we said, you won’t be able to get all of them in a single jump, so we recommend playing out the rest of the match to work towards completing the other challenges. Then, once the match is over, repeat the process. Before long you’ll have completed the rings challenge and also made a fair amount of progress on finishing up the others.
If you need help completing the other challenges from the season, check out our full Season 6 challenge guide. If you’re on top of it all and need something else to do, Epic recently rolled out Fortnite update v6.22 and introduced two new limited-time modes. Team Terror, which pits two teams of 32 against each other and throws in some Cube Monsters for good measure. Blitz, meanwhile, is a high-speed version of the standard Battle Royale mode that makes the circle start to close from the outset. It’ll also shrink more frequently than usual, so your matches shouldn’t go on beyond 15 minutes.
In only a few hours playing Just Cause 4, I had summoned an electrical storm to blow up an enemy base (as well as some nearby unsuspecting cows), turned a monster truck into deadly spinning airship, and been thrown hundreds of feet by a tornado after riding it using a wingsuit. I also managed to get struck by my own summoned lightning on more than one occasion–retribution, perhaps, for those cows.
Just Cause 3 was notable at its 2015 release for the amount of creativity and chaos you could create within it–indeed, that was the point. During a hands-on preview for Just Cause 4 in Los Angeles, developer Avalanche Studios demonstrated just how much it has turned up the dial on your capability to wreak goofy, physics-based havoc in its upcoming sequel. Between new, huge weather events and a toolkit for making things move, fly, explode, and snap together, there’s plenty of fun to have in seeing how ingeniously you can combine its many intricate systems, and use them to blow things up.
Creative Destruction
The big driver of the creativity in players’ hands in Just Cause 4 is the expanded grappling hook carried by protagonist Rico Rodriguez. Not only does the grappler still let you zip around the game world or tether objects to make them smash together, you can now add inflatable balloons and tiny rocket boosters to objects, and in greater numbers than in Just Cause 3. There’s also a new loadout menu that lets you define a bunch of parameters about said tethers, balloons, and boosters–like how much lift your balloons have, whether your rockets explode when they run out of fuel, the speed at which your tethers retract, and more. You can flip between loadouts instantly, making it easy to add balloons, rockets, and tethers one after another.
All of that means you get unprecedented control over your grappler abilities, which encourage you to make Minecraft-like contraptions using the physics of the Just Cause 4 world. After taking a monster truck for a spin down the highway, crushing all cars in my path, I hooked it up with some balloons and boosters and turned it into a flying, semi-controllable monster airship.
Of course, poor planning and a misunderstanding of remedial physics caused the truck to spin end-over-end at speeds that probably would have liquefied poor Rico’s internal organs, but once I got the hang of it, I could fly the truck around pretty reliably, then drop it back onto the ground and drive away. You can use those same abilities in combat to do things like turn vehicles into rocket-powered wrecking balls, or just send unsuspecting bad guys floating into the ether for daring to draw down on you.
Ride The Lightning
The capabilities and combinations available in the grappler offer a host of possibilities for getting into serious trouble in Just Cause 4, but the game raises the stakes in a second way: extreme weather. Avalanche showed off its in-game tornadoes at E3 2018, which can ravage the countryside, tearing up things like trees, buildings, and people, and there are also lightning storms, sandstorms, and blizzards to look forward to as well.
Weather is something players both have to navigate and that can used to their advantage, but seeing as this is a Just Cause game, Avalanche has also weaponized some of that weather for your enjoyment, in the form of experimental weapons. We tried a Wind Cannon gun that could blast enemies, vehicles, and objects with tornado-force gusts, capable of literally blowing away tanks and even guard towers; a Lightning Cannon that could fire both a laser-like beam of electricity; and a grenade that created a small-scale lightning storm.
That storm, which spanned a pretty large area and saw lots of lightning bolts arcing down all over the place, is a hilarious agent of chaos even beyond what players might plan. Though it was clear the game somewhat prioritizes lightning striking targets like enemies or explosive objects, the lightning will also go after civilians, animals, vehicles, and even Rico himself.
With all those systems at play, it’s a given that players will come up with weird, novel, and ridiculous solutions to problems and ways to make those systems interact. Giving players that freedom is part of what Avalanche is going for–and even if unexpected interactions create bugs or problems, that’s okay, too.
“When you build systems rather than scripting things, you get combinations that you weren’t expecting,” said Hamish Young, lead mechanics designer on Just Cause 4. Young shared a story about how he managed to drive a car into a tornado in the game, which then carried him out over a river. He managed to get enough speed while the vehicle flew through the storm that he exited on the far side of the water and drove off. Avalanche didn’t plan for tornadoes to work as de facto bridges, but that’s the sort of emergent, interesting situations that building interworking systems can facilitate.
“We kind of have a rule, where it’s kind of okay for the game to ‘break,’ as long as it’s funny,” Young said. “We always try to make sure that, we may not cover every possible edge case, but we try to do enough that if it does break, then at least people are having fun.”
A Different Approach To Story
If there’s a place where Avalanche isn’t doubling down on making things more exaggerated and insane, though, it might be in Just Cause 4’s story. The core, like other games in the series, is that Rico is trying to whip up the people of the game’s setting, an island called Solis, into a rebellion against oppressive rulers. Another motivation, though, is that he’s investigating the suspicious death of his father.
Narrative Designer Ben Jaekle said that with this installment, Avalanche is trying to make its characters feel a bit more realistic, even as they deal with over-the-top situations.
“In Just Cause 4, our approach was to kind of deliver a slightly more grounded experience,” he said. “We kind of wanted to rein in the characters a little bit, and focus on the idea of ordinary, likeable people with heart and intelligence and desires, who are put into a really extraordinary environment where a tornado rips a train off the tracks and throws it at you. So instead of people necessarily making really cheesy jokes about how the train comes flying at you, they might react in a slightly more believable, real way. Which I think makes those moments better, because they feel less cartoony and they feel more real, and therefore more funny. So you’re like, ‘Yeah, I probably would have said that too if a train came flying at my face.'”
Still, if Avalanche’s preview of the game was any indication, there will be plenty of opportunities to fly around Solis, dropping lightning on people and turning tanks into floating death balloons. Just Cause 4 hits PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on December 4.
It’s been exciting times in the world of Fortnite lately. The Halloween event, Fortnitemares, came to a close–and in quite spectacular fashion, with a one-time event that transported players into an alternate world. In the aftermath of the event, Kevin the cube has vanished, and a new land mass has appeared in Loot Lake. The full implications of this remain to be seen, but we expect developer Epic Games will be digging into the mysteries of the new location over the coming weeks. In the meantime, there are challenges to be completed.
At this point all of this should be second nature, but here’s a quick primer for the newcomers: Each week there’s a fresh set of Fortnite challenges for players to complete. By doing so, players earn Battle Stars which level up the Battle Pass and unlocks cosmetic rewards. Some challenges, and thus unlocks, are exclusive to those that have spent money on a paid-tier for the Battle Pass.
This week’s challenges are pretty straightforward. On the free side, you’ll need to get seven ammo boxes in a single match, deal 500 headshot damage to enemies, and–as part of a three stage challenge–deal 300 damage to opponents in a single match. Once you’ve done that, the next stage will reveal itself, and the same goes for the third stage.
For those that have paid for a Battle Pass, you’ll need to do another multi-stage challenge which begins with destroying 50 trees. There’s also a third multi-stage challenge that kicks off with consuming five apples. Other challenges in this tier involve skydiving through 20 floating rings and eliminating three opponents in Pleasant Park.
Fortnite Season 6, Week 7 Challenges
Free
Search 7 Ammo Boxes in a single match (7) — 5 Battle Stars
Deal headshot damage to opponents (500) — 5 Battle Stars
Stage 1: Deal damage to opponents in a single match (300)– 2 Battle Stars
Battle Pass
Stage 1: Destroy trees (50) — 5 Battle Stars
Skydive through floating rings (20) — 5 Battle Stars
Stage 1: consume 5 Apples (5) — 10 Battle Stars
Eliminate opponents in Pleasant Park (3) — 10 Battle Stars
Epic recently rolled out Fortnite update v6.22 and introduced two new limited-time modes. The first LTM is Team Terror, which pits two teams of 32 against each other with the goal of wiping out the opposing side. However, Cube Monsters, the enemies that players had to battle against during the Fortnitemares event, will also be out for blood.
The second LTM is Blitz, which speeds up the Battle Royale formula by making the storm circle start to close in right from the start of the match. On top of that, it’ll shrink more frequently than usual, so matches should last around 15 minutes.
The patch also introduces the new heavy assault rifle. The update also laid the groundwork for new NFL skins that are expected to be out later this week. If you’ve still got outstanding challenges from previous weeks check out our Season 6 challenge guide.
